The twelve-year-old barely looked at this one, I'm not sure why not. Everyone else read and enjoyed it, although I don't think any of us liked it as much as we expected to.
Plotwise, in this book Deadpool helps the GLI save the world, and in return is made a reserve member of the team. Unfortunately (for the GLI) their headquarters are much nicer than Deadpool's own, and he decides to stick around. The rest of the book is devoted to the GLI's efforts to extract Deadpool from their lair.
The story in which Squirrel Girl confronts the former Speedball--now Penance--about the changes he has undergone is clever and nicely done, although I personally never read a thing with Speedball in it before Civil War, so I may not properly appreciate either his transformation or this story. :)
Flatman's "origami-fu" battle with Deadpool was easily the best visual in the book, well done!
Finally, Deadpool's date with Big Bertha: one of the GLI's plans to oust Wade involves the crush he has on Bertha. He is thrilled to have a date with his dream girl, right up until she shows up in her non-super identity of slender supermodel Ashley Crawford. Wade attempts, not very successfully, to hide his disappointment, takes her to an all-you-can-eat seafood dive, and encourages her to eat hearty. While there, they encounter a group of villains, and Bertha returns to her full size to do battle. Wade is delighted, and when Bertha realizes why, she's angry ("You just see me as some kind of--fetish!). This seems realistic to me--I have single friends, large women who really don't want someone who only wants them for their bodies, any more than sensible standard-sized women want someone who only wants them for their bodies. The segment ends predictably--although Bertha is upset about being objectified, either by Deadpool now or by society as a whole when she's in her supermodel identity, and is in the middle of expressing her wish that people would just look beyond the surface when Deadpool pulls off his mask, and she is unable to overlook his physical disfigurement. End story.
Deadpool has consistently been portrayed as having non-standard taste in women--his long-standing crush on Bea Arthur, for example. This is typically played for laughs, as it is here--as a symptom of Wade's screwed-up mental state. (Because obviously no man in his right mind would prefer Bertha to Ashley. :P)
But Deadpool is not not limited by this--he has also consistently been portrayed as interested in women in general. (He's certainly interested in Sandi and Outlaw in his own book, both of whom are pretty typical comic book women) He may have some atypical preferences but he doesn't lack interest in women who don't fit those categories. He doesn't depend on those physical characteristics to create sexual arousal. His preferences are not a fetish--they are preferences. If Deadpool has a preference for large women, or older women (seemingly in the same way that some men might prefer redheads, or women in glasses) that's only remarkable because of cultural expectatons, not because of the nature of the preference. You know, though, I don't think it's the technical definition of "fetish"--implying the need for what is fetishized, not a simple liking--that was intended here. It's that such a preference is so far outside the cultural norm that many people have a hard time seeing it as anything but deviant.
Heh. I cannot believe that I'm looking for consistency in this book. (And I'm certainly not making an argument that Deadpool is any sort of feminist role model, or even someone you'd want to go out with under any circumstances. :)) Still, given what I've seen of Wade's characterization in the past (and I'm a relatively recent Deadpool fan so I may be missing something) I'd say that his depiction here (with regard to Bertha) is slightly out of character.
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